Delicate first-person verse and a stirring orchestration of watercolour, charcoal and ballpoint pen illustrations peek inside a young artist as he wrestles with his family’s issues of addiction and loss.

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Good morning! I just listened to your wonderful review of BIRD, and I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to hear PARENTS talking about the books they read to their children…BIRD is definitely a book that benefits from adult-child conversation (all books do, really), and you both are obviously thoughtful, sensitive readers yourselves (traits you’ve no doubt passed on to your girls). There is sadness in BIRD, but I’m glad you were also able to see the hope and the strong support system BIRD has, which will likely keep him on track. I have to say, I’m Canadian and I’ve lived in the US for over a dozen years…I’ve always doubted that there was an audience for my work “up north,” and so it’s very meaningful to me to know that you *found* BIRD and felt it merited this special treatment. Thank you very, very much!

We’ve just added a video to accompany this post. Thanks so much to Zetta and Shadra for sharing sketches, images from the book and photographs of the book launch party, and to Lee and Low Books for producing a great promotional video from which we used a few clips.

Good morning! Great to see your post about this book. I received it from Lee & Low and will be posting my review this weekend. I will link to yours another perspective. Also, thanks for the Poetry Round-Up site as I wasn’t sure where it was this week.

Wow. This sounds like a very powerful story and the artwork is breathtaking. My critique group and I have discussed just how heavy a “picture book” could be, and this seems to break the rules (if there are any). I love it.

Wow! I don’t need any excuse to check in with y’all, but this is so wonderful. The video adds so much … and keeps me from multi-tasking. I especially loved your pan of the young boy sitting by himself reading the book.

wow, JOMB, I think you are reading my mind or monitoring my book purchases or something. You guys are always right there with me on my latest favorite book! I LOVE Bird. The story offers so much more than many picture books, and the artwork is absolutely beautiful and perfect for the text. Thank you for reviewing this amazing book!

BIRD’s drawings were done on the spot in various parts of NYC. I did a lot of location drawing of the things around me (buses, ad trees, and buildings, and people) the way I imagined Bird would. I pulled those original line drawings directly from the sketchbooks for the final artwork.

Thanks to Zetta for an amazing story, and thanks to our editor for being brave enough to address the issues and not censoring the text. 😉

Your thoughts and feelings about the book, BIRD, mirrors what our book club members had to say about it when we read it earlier this month. Our book club enjoyed your presentation very much! The kids and I also wanted to say that we were honored and humbled to hear one of our fav reviews included in your presentation – THANK YOU SO MUCH! We truly appreciate all that you do to promote literacy and great children’s literature!